On the other hand, the second kind of open-source community may have a vendor that controls the project and the project could potentially be “purchased.” MySQL is one such example.

With Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems, it also acquires MySQL, the poster child for open-source applications. (Not to mention Solaris, which Sun says is a larger Linux distribution than Red Hat.

Engineering teams from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter have begun work on WebScaleSQL, an open source project designed to address the challenges of running MySQL at Web scale.